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For, even though the I is sovereign in choosing, yet by the
fact of the choice the thing done takes its place in the ordered
total. Your personality does not come from outside into the
universal scheme; you are a part of it, you and your personal
disposition.
But what is the cause of this initial personality?
This question resolves itself into two: are we to make the
Creator, if Creator there is, the cause of the moral quality of
the individual or does the responsibility lie with the creature?
Or is there, perhaps, no responsibility? After all, none is
charged in the case of plants brought into being without the
perceptive faculties; no one is blamed because animals are not
all that men are- which would be like complaining that men are
not all that gods are. Reason acquits plant and animal and, their
maker; how can it complain because men do not stand above
humanity?
If the reproach simply means that Man might improve by bringing
from his own stock something towards his betterment we must allow
that the man failing in this is answerable for his own
inferiority: but if the betterment must come not from within the
man but from without, from his Author, it is folly to ask more
than has been given, as foolish in the case of man as in plant
and animal.
The question is not whether a thing is inferior to something else
but whether in its own Kind it suffices to its own part;
universal equality there cannot be.
Then the Reason-Principle has measured things out with the set
purpose of inequality?
Certainly not: the inequality is inevitable by the nature of
things: the Reason-Principle of this Universe follows upon a
phase of the Soul; the Soul itself follows upon an Intellectual
Principle, and this Intellectual Principle is not one among the
things of the Universe but is all things; in all things, there is
implied variety of things; where there is variety and not
identity there must be primals, secondaries, tertiaries and every
grade downward. Forms of life, then, there must be that are not
pure Soul but the dwindling of Souls enfeebled stage by stage of
the process. There is, of course, a Soul in the Reason-Principle
constituting a living being, but it is another Soul [a lesser
phase], not that [the Supreme Soul] from which the
Reason-Principle itself derives; and this combined vehicle of
life weakens as it proceeds towards matter, and what it engenders
is still more deficient. Consider how far the engendered stands
from its origin and yet, what a marvel!
In sum nothing can secure to a thing of process the quality of
the prior order, loftier than all that is product and amenable to
no charge in regard to it: the wonder is, only, that it reaches
and gives to the lower at all, and that the traces of its
presence should be so noble. And if its outgiving is greater than
the lower can appropriate, the debt is the heavier; all the blame
must fall upon the unreceptive creature, and Providence be the
more exalted.
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